Tag: Waste

The Center For Investigative Reporting has a scandalous expose on the hypocritical practices of public servants who waste millions of gallons watering their own desert lawns while demanding that other Californians conserve.

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Pentagon is building a multimillion-dollar facility in northern Florida to, in effect, duplicate research already being done by the Department of Health and Human Services. That’s one expensive turf battle.

It’s not the biggest boondoggle in the war on terrorism/Iraq, but it’s a reminder that two presidents into the great Mesopotamian adventure, the U.S. still knows how to find a hole and throw money in it.

For those who live there, life at the wrong end of Avenue 54 in Southern California’s eastern Coachella Valley is a hot, rotting hell. As you head east, the “Bermuda shorts, putting greens and picture-window champagne dinners” found in abundance near the Arnold Palmer Golf Course give way to … (more)

A three-year study by a nonpartisan panel reported Wednesday that the U.S. wasted between $31 billion and $60 billion, or about $12 million every day, on wartime contracts for services in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last decade. (more)

By an estimate its co-chairs call conservative, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting has found that the government wasted $30 billion on the use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. The co-chairs, writing in The Washington Post, say that number could double. (more)

“If the Pentagon wants something, the logic goes, then it must be necessary,” writes Gregg Easterbrook in a recent examination of military waste. As a result, military spending has jumped 119 percent since 2001, 68 percent if you exclude the two wars fought in that time.

Of the 52 million people who received $250 stimulus checks last year, 72,000 were dead. While the loss of much of that $18 million is unfortunate, and we are sure to hear all about it in various campaigns, the waste adds up to a tiny sliver of a fraction of the nearly $800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

We all know the violent side of occupation, but what about the environmental? It may sound ridiculous, but Israeli settlements are dumping untreated waste into a canal that runs into the West Bank while the Israeli government is banning attempts by Palestinians to divert or treat that waste.

In news that would make Han Solo proud, the U.S. Missile Defense Agency has shot down a ballistic missile using a high-powered laser. The technology, which never, ever worked in the past, is criticized by some as weaponizing space and others as a colossal waste of resources.

Encompassing an estimated 78 percent of e-mail, spam remains the bane of many Internet users. The man who has declared himself spam’s godfather, Alan Ralsky, has been sentenced to 51 months in prison for his role in an e-mail stock scam.

Don’t be fooled by stimulus critics who cite expenditures such as the “electric fish orchestra” (actually an educational demonstration of a larger project related to robotics and prosthetics) or trips to resorts (to train special-ed teachers). “Waste,” as ProPublica reports, “is in the eye of the beholder.” (continued)

DynCorp International got caught charging the government $50 million over contract for providing living facilities in Kuwait. The company’s CEO told a congressional commission, “If we’re not competitive [in costs], it’s possible for the government to replace us.” But the opposite seems to be true when it comes to contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, where fraud, waste and abuse have been all too common for years.

After the president signs a $106 billion emergency supplemental, the U.S. will have shelled out about $1 trillion in “emergency” funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—not including the Pentagon’s obscene annual budget, exponentially expanding health care costs for wounded troops, and the interest on all that debt. True to form, lawmakers threw in $2.7 billion worth of cargo planes no one asked for.

You may have heard about the scandalously overpriced presidential helicopters the U.S. had ordered from Italy, but did you know they may have been a payoff for forged intelligence used to sell the war in Iraq? It’s all a part of “a web of conspiracy and deceit,” says journalist Paolo Pontoniere.

He’s back: Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has released a new volume in his series of blood-boiling reports. Looking back on his five years as a watchdog, Bowen laments the widespread waste of taxpayer funds in Iraq, and warns that the same mistakes are being made in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama’s economy-oriented speaking spree continued on Tuesday, with a third speech planned for Wednesday. Tuesday’s talk focused on eliminating federal budget waste and introducing new additions to his economic team.

Here’s a solution to the energy crisis Americans are sure to love: A company called Geoplasma is building a plant in Florida that will vaporize garbage with a plasma torch, turning 1,500 tons of waste into 60 megawatts of the good stuff. It may not be as clean as solar, but hey, America is the Saudi Arabia of trash.

As one U.S. soldier tells Truthdig foreign correspondent Anna Badkhen, it’s not entirely a bad sign that residents of Baghdad’s Saidiyah neighborhood are complaining about their meager daily power allotment: A year earlier they were concerned about just staying alive.

Seventy-five percent of projects surveyed in the latest report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction were no longer functioning properly. Investigators said facilities began breaking down after only six months and that roughly $5 billion is lost every year to fraud.

Many of our nation’s latest scandals, from the abject failure to rebuild New Orleans to the abuse of veterans at Walter Reed, are the logical result of a contempt for government so zealously implemented by Ronald Reagan and his political descendants.

The latest report from the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction says tens of millions of dollars have been wasted because of failure and fraud. Among other abuses, the report cites a never-used $48.3-million housing facility, complete with an Olympic-size swimming pool. If Willie Sutton were alive today, he’d head straight to Baghdad.